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ENJOYABLE NEIGHBORS Social interactions in the society of enjoyment necessarily involve an encounter with the other’s private enjoyment. Whereas within the society of prohibition subjects hid their enjoyment, fearful of violating the prohibition and enduring some form of censure, today the situation has become completely reversed: subjects feel guilty not for exposing their enjoyment publicly, but for failing to do so. To fail to enjoy publicly is to ostracize oneself, to miss out on what everyone else is accessing. As a result, we are continually confronted with the image of the enjoying other—a confrontation that produces the incivility and aggressiveness symptomatic of the society of enjoyment. Surrounded by these images of enjoyment, the subject experiences the contradiction of being enjoined to enjoy itself while feeling its own lack of enjoyment in contrast with the other.1 This is why the image of the enjoying other triggers the reactions of incivility and aggressiveness, which are symptomatic in the society of enjoyment. As Lacan says in Seminar XI, “Such is true envy—the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the objet a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction .”2 In the wake of the command to enjoy, the subject often experiences this “true envy.” If the other appears to have the objet petit a, the secret of 177 Chapter Nine Explosions of Incivility, Aggressiveness, and Violence enjoyment that rightfully belongs to the subject—and if the other publicly parades this objet petit a—then the subject feels no duty to civility. The absence of civility in the society of enjoyment indicates the extent to which the subject in this society remains lacking. That is to say, the contemporary subject becomes uncivil because she/he continues to be haunted by her/his own lack of enjoyment. If we were really enjoying ourselves today, we would not develop aggressiveness in response to the other’s enjoyment and believe that this enjoyment is rightfully ours. Instead, content with our own enjoyment, we would adopt an attitude of indifference toward that of the other. When I am really enjoying, I do not envy the enjoyment of the other, as the uncivil and aggressive subject in the society of enjoyment does. Incivility and aggressiveness are symptomatic of the society of enjoyment because its subjects are constitutively unable to enjoy themselves and yet constantly feel as if enjoyment is their right. Many social commentators have recently tackled the subject of rising incivility and aggressiveness, but none has linked this phenomenon to the disappearance of prohibition as directly as popular cultural critic Stephen Carter. Carter, best known for The Culture of Disbelief, sees incivility as the product of our refusal of individual sacrifice for the sake of the society as a whole—that is, to translate it into our terms, as the result of a turn away from the prohibition of enjoyment. In his treatise Civility, he claims, “Civility is possible only if members of a community bind themselves to obey a set of rules of behavior not because the law requires it but because they understand the virtue of sacrificing their own desires—their own freedom to choose—for the good of the larger community of which they are a part.”3 As subjects refuse this sacrifice— or the social order no longer explicitly demands it—civility increasingly transforms into incivility. We become reluctant to set aside our own enjoyment and instead insist on it. This affects the way that we drive, walk, shop, talk, and generally interact with other subjects. The experience of driving tends inherently to produce a sense of isolation. As Gary Cross points out, when they became widely available, cars added to a process of privatization. He notes, “the car culture produced a plethora of new privatized pleasures, enjoyed by millions.”4 From the perspective of the car, others exist in another world, a world wholly apart from oneself.5 Carter notes the vast difference between traveling by train (the primary mode of transportation in the later nineteenth century) and traveling by car. On the train, one must accommodate oneself to fellow passengers, and, even more importantly, one experiences others as fellow passengers in the first place. Everyone exists, albeit temporarily, in the same social world. The culture of the car represents a radical contrast. The car isolates the driver from others: others are competing drivers rather than...

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